Free Republic

It is still unclear what happened on Sunday night at Iran’s illicit nuclear installation at Parchin. According to Iranian sources, there was a large explosion that rocked the area within a 15-km. radius of the facility. Two people were reportedly injured. According to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and Israel, the Parchin facility is a key component of Iran’s suspected military nuclear program. It is at Parchin that Iran is allegedly building a nuclear explosive device – that is, a nuclear warhead. The timing of the blast is notable. On Monday night, a delegation from the IAEA landed in...

Ethnic Kurds clashed overnight with alleged members of a hardline Islamist movement in Hamburg last night, as ISIS clashes spread far from Syria. Police in the northern German city say 14 people were injured overnight in the violence involving hundreds of demonstrators before riot police were able to quell the disturbance. Police spokesman Karina Sadowsky said this morning that fighting began after hundreds of Kurds held a protest against the Islamic State group... ...Last night's violence in Germany came as at least nine Kurdish demonstrators were killed by police in Turkey as demonstrations against the government's failure to help Syrian...

A court in the Belarusian capital Minsk has jailed eight Ukrainian football fans after they sang an insulting song about Russian President Vladimir Putin. One man was sent to prison for 10 days for possessing fascist symbols. Seven others were jailed for five days for using obscene language. They had joined in anti-Putin chants and songs at the Euro 2016 qualifier between Ukraine and Belarus. A number of Belarusian fans were also convicted and fined. Both local and visiting fans at the Euro 2016 qualifier between Ukraine and Belarus in Borisov came together in a rousing rendition of a well-known...

Even after decades of making the most eccentric statements, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka can still impress. In an interview with Kazakhstan's 16/12 Internet television channel posted on October 5, he flatly condemned Russia's bid to redraw international borders in Europe. Lukashenka argued that, once the process of rearranging borders according to historical claims begins, there is no end to it -- and Russia might end up disappearing if the borders of the medieval Mongol-Tatar Yoke are revived. "Then we would have to give to Mongolia and Kazakhstan and someone else practically all the territory of Russia and Western Europe and...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Kremlin-backed Russia Today news network has rolled out a provocative ad campaign that takes a sharp poke at U.S. media and the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The pitch is aimed at convincing Americans of the merits of Russia Today - or RT - as an alternate news source to U.S. networks. Featuring a stylized image of former U.S Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations, one ad reads: "This is what happens when there is no second opinion. Iraq War: No WMDs. 141, 802 civilian deaths." The campaign includes two other...

The United States and Russia are dangerously close to stumbling into a war over Ukraine that could go nuclear and kill hundreds of millions of people in a single day, a Nobel laureate who is one of the world’s leading experts on the dangers of nuclear weapons warned in Washington this week. “It’s an incredibly dangerous situation. …If there’s a nuclear war tonight, that’s the Northern Hemisphere (of the entire world) gone, Dr. Helen Caldicott told a National Press Club Newsmakers news conference on Wednesday. She was speaking on the topic: “Ukraine: Is Nuclear Conflict Likely?” Caldicott is an Australian...

ISIS Bearing Down On Baghdad Even As World Watches Kobani Siege October 10, 2014 Waves of U.S.-led air strikes against Islamic State fighters appear to have done little to stem the terrorist army’s advance in Syria, and now the militants are close to overrunning key positions on the outskirts of Baghdad. With the world’s eyes on the terrorist army’s siege of the Syrian border city of Kobani, where U.S.-led airstrikes are backing Kurdish fighters, some 500 miles southeast, Islamic State fighters are within eight miles of the Iraqi metropolis. The Islamic militants have reportedly infiltrated the Baghdad suburb of Abu...

Dissidents claim nuclear facilities moved to conceal location; Rouhani says P5+1, Iran agree on principles for final deal, but gaps remain over the details Iranian dissidents said that Tehran is still researching nuclear arms at facilities it relocated to escape detection. It said Mohsem Fakhrizadeh, whom it described as a Revolutionary Guard brigadier general, leads the SPND.

Bad news for the official authorities, television anchormen, and fascist ideologues: Russian culture became great, only after Russia became Europe It has already been six months since the victory of the Maidan (Ukrainian Independence Rallies)... CENSORED. TEXT TEMPORARILY HIDDEN AT THE REQUEST OF ROSKOMNADZOR (Russian FCC) - AWAITING DECISION OF THE COURT. ...In this context: what is this special "Russian culture"? There certainly is a Russian culture, and it gave the world great works of music, poetry and literature. The problem is that Russian culture became great, only when Russia became Europe. Tchaikovsky was not born of the balalaika, and...

Vulgar chants about Vladimir Putin before he arrived for a regional summit in Belarus did not augur well for the Russian president's hopes of bringing the leaders of former Soviet republics closer together. Matters got even worse when bickering broke out at the start of the meeting, revealing fault lines over the Ukraine crisis and deepening doubts about the future of the loose grouping known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. Jibes between Putin and the leader of Moldova, and barbs aimed at the absent Ukrainian leader, raised new questions about his ability to woo countries to the Eurasian Economic...

One of the victims of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash was found wearing an oxygen mask, raising the possibility that some passengers may have been conscious as the aircraft went down in eastern Ukraine. Nearly 300 people died when the passenger jet crashed in July while flying over insurgent-held territory in eastern Ukraine. "You know that somebody was discovered wearing an oxygen mask and had time to put it on," Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans said on a late night Dutch chat show. The foreign minister suggested the passengers may have been conscious as the plane went down. The...

Moscow (AFP) - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, 83, has been hospitalised but is determined to fight for his life, Russian press agencies reported Thursday. "My state of health has been moderate for a week and today I am in hospital. My health is deteriorating," Gorbachev was cited as saying by Ria Novosti agency. "I'm hooked up to a monitor," he added, without saying where or why he was hospitalised. "You know my character. I am determined to fight for my life," he told Interfax news agency. The last leader of the Soviet Union was hospitalised in June 2013 for...

20-year-old Anton Tumanov, from Kozmodemyansk in Mari El Republic, went to war and died. This is his mother’s story.

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Good afternoon, friends, ladies and gentlemen, I hope that the place for your discussions, for our meetings is well chosen and that the timing is good. We are in the centre of Russia – not a geographical centre, but a spiritual one. [Novgorod Region] is a cradle of Russian statehood. Our outstanding historians believe and have analysed how the elements of Russian statehood came together right here. This is in the light of the fact that two great rivers – the Volkhov and Neva – acted as natural means of communication, providing a natural linkage...

Russia is beginning the production of an antiviral drug it has approved for the treatment of Ebola, a news report said, while a senior World Health Organization official urged stronger international efforts to contain the virus outbreak in West Africa. The Russian Health Ministry has approved the production of the drug, Triazavirin, developed by researchers at the Institute of Organic Synthesis in the Urals region, said Sergei Kortov, a senior official at a regional patent service, the Novy Region news agency reported Tuesday. The approval followed 20 years of research and a series of clinical trials on 100 volunteers from...

An outpouring of Russian patriotism has accompanied the war in Ukraine and Russian support for the rebels fighting the Kiev government's forces in the east. In some cases, Russian antagonism towards the Kiev authorities and the West has spilled on to the streets. And Muscovites themselves have been the target. Journalist Anna Ratafyeva was travelling on the Moscow metro when she was slapped in the face by an elderly woman who didn't like the picture of cartoon character Snoopy waving a Union Jack on the front of her sweatshirt. The incident happened in September, Ms Ratafyeva wrote on her Facebook...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's finance minister said on Tuesday the country could no longer afford a multi-billion-dollar revamp of the armed forces approved by President Vladimir Putin, stepping up a campaign to trim spending as sanctions over the Ukraine crisis bite. Anton Siluanov said a new defense program should be drawn up to take into account the changed economic situation, even though the deputy prime minister in charge of the sector has been ruling out any cuts in military spending. "A new defense program will be prepared now, and in its framework we want to reconsider the amount of resources...

John Batchelor interviews Anna Nemtsova Audio 39:53

Designers competing to create an aircraft that could directly support troops on the battlefield were hampered by the weight of the ‘flying tank’, low air speed and flimsy protection. The Il-2 was the answer to these challenges. One of the key lessons of the First World War was that the airplane had a crucial role to play in effective military campaigns in the new era. With this in mind, in the 1920s and 1930s Europe’s leading nations expended significant efforts and resources on developing new aircraft that could be used to provide support for infantry and tanks. The Soviet Union...

The city of Kharkov, a virtual border town with Russia of one million strong just north of the war zone in southeastern Ukraine, recently tore down a gigantic statue of Vladimir Lenin in one of the biggest squares in the world. But President Obama’s most recent response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to send his former campaign finance chairman and current U.S. Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, otherwise known as the “Queen of the subprime mortgage” meltdown, to Kiev to cajole Ukraine into serious economic “reforms” ...